Remarks and a question-and-answer session at Kramer Junior High School

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 7, 1994

So then most States--and the Federal Government has sentencing guidelines on this--most States have laws which say if you commit a second crime, you have to serve a much longer period of time before you're eligible for parole. But under this provision we say if the crimes are violent, if you're really hurting somebody, then you shouldn't be paroled at all if you do it three times, because you've obviously shown that you're going to spend your life hurting other people, and it's not worth the risk.

But the first two will be covered by whatever the law is now. And it depends on what the crime is and what the circumstances are.

Safe Drinking Water

Q. Good morning, Mr. President. I'm in the seventh grade. In your State of the Union Address, you mentioned the Safe Water Act. What are some of the specifics of this act?

The President. It's a drinking water act, safe drinking water act, and what we have to--we have to reauthorize it, but basically what it does is to set standards. It's important now in Washington, you know, because you just had some problems with that, serious problems. What it will do is to set standards for the testing of water throughout the country and all municipalities, all cities, and the evaluations of the water systems and will have certain requirements to upgrade those systems, hopefully before something terrible happens like this; that the whole idea of it is to find out problems, if the drinking water of a given community--normally it will start to get bad and will slowly deteriorate. So the idea is to have a testing procedure so that the quality of the water can always be monitored. And if it starts to deteriorate, there will be a requirement that it be cleaned up so that people will always have a safe water supply all over the country. Crime

Q. Hello, Mr. President. I would like to know, what can I do in my community to stop crime?

The President. Give her a hand. |Applause~ That's great. Well, I think there are several things that you can do as a young person in your community to stop crime. But let me just mention, if I might, two or three.

One is, people always talk today about gangs, people joining gangs and how bad it is, right? But the truth is, everybody wants to be in some kind of gang. If you play on a football team, it's a gang, right? If you belong to a certain church, that's a group of people who believe like you do, and you're with them every Sunday, and they're part of your crowd, and it's part of your identity. In other words, all of us want to be with other people who are like us, who make us feel good and important because we're a part of their group. In a way, the Kramer School is a gang, right? It's a group of people who go here, and there's a limited number of people, and others don't go here. So the first thing I want to say to you is, I think that the more you can do as a young person to get other young people to associate with each other in positive ways, the less likely they'll be to associate with each other in negative ways. You can't just tell kids no all day; sometimes you've got to have something to say yes about. There has to be something to say yes to. And you can ask adults to do what they need to do; if there needs to be more opportunity for recreation or something else that adults should do, provide for you, so that people can have positive associations, I think that counts, first thing. The second thing I think is important is that we know crime goes down where police officers work in neighborhoods on a consistent basis, know the young people, know the adults, and work to prevent crime instead of just to catch criminals. So the second thing you could do is to help organize people in your neighborhood to work with people in the police to stop crime before it happens, that is, to report suspicious things; if you think there is drug dealing going on or you think there are people with illegal weapons or you think there is something else going on, there's some risk that might be happening, to let people know in advance. And that really counts for a lot. I have seen cities in this country with very tough neighborhoods where the crime rate dropped dramatically because the people in the neighborhood got organized and worked with the police on the front end to stop things from happening. The third thing you could do that I think is really important is to do everything you can to organize young people to keep each other in school, because most people who show up for school on time, stay in school, learn something when they're in school, and try to work out their problems in a positive way in school don't wind up getting in trouble with the law. Those are the three things that I think you could do that would have the biggest impact on the crime problem.